Writing

Laughter

Posted on June 11, 2011 at 1:53 pm

This piece of writing was done in a writing workshop. We were given 20 minutes to write. The topic I chose was Hearing – the sound of laughter.

It’s been said by many that laughter is a form of healing. It takes less muscles to smile than to frown, so you shouldn’t waste your energy on frowning. At least that’s how the saying goes. In reality I’m not sure if that is true, based on some Internet research. Growing up I found that I smile a lot more than I frown. Maybe that is why people say I look younger than I really am – Positive energy.

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Homework again?

Posted on May 31, 2011 at 9:43 am

A recent Board of Education meeting brought up the subject of homework again. This rears its head every 5 to 10 years. Usually there is discussion for a while, mostly complaints: There’s too much homework. Why does my child have to do school work at home when they have finished 6 hours of work in school? There’s not enough homework. Vacations are for families, not for schoolwork. My child spends 4-5 hours a night on homework. Homework looks just like busy work. Does the teacher even look at what they are assigning?

 

Occasionally after discussions, surveys are taken, sometimes decisions and policies are made and then we wait another 5 to 10 years until the topic comes up again with a new set of parents.

 

As a teacher I always had a different take on homework. I must note that I’ve always taught elementary students through 6th grade; I was the sole provider of academic work and homework, which is different from the concerns of Middle and High School parents, where teachers from different classes all assign homework with little knowledge of what other teachers have assigned. For me the expectation was that I had to give homework. Homework was supposed to be an extension of the class work that we were doing. Early in my teaching it was difficult to come up with homework since I felt that most of the things I taught worked better when I was there to mediate. There were other subjects that I didn’t feel was as prioritized to focus on which I was mandated to teach and give as homework. One principal said to me if I give homework in certain areas, even though I didn’t want to, it would appease the parents and thus allow me to do other things that I wanted to do that might have more resistance.  This actually worked out to be a good philosophy; only I didn’t use it as a way to appease parents as much as I did to appease my administrator. I had the range of parent complaints of there is too much to there is too little homework (on the same assignments).

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Steering the Craft – Sentence/Paragraph exercise

Posted on May 3, 2011 at 9:53 am

This is a continuation of the exercises from the Ursula K. Le Guin’s book, Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew

Part one of this assignment was to write a paragraph of narrative, 100-150 words, in sentences of seven or fewer words. Each sentence must have a subject and a verb.

Sitting at my writer’s desk and looking out my window this is what I saw:

A woodpecker sits on the feeder. It is outside my balcony window. It has a red head. It is searching for bits of food. There is not much food left for it. A squirrel pauses on the ground. It looks up at the woodpecker. It must decide soon. Should I try or not? Though tempting, there is a cage. The cage protects the food. The woodpecker leaves. The squirrel advances. Cage or not it will eat. As it climbs it surveys obstacles. Poking through the cage it tries. It does not get much seed. The woodpecker was not a neat eater. It was very picky. Much of the food was tossed aside. “Aside” means it landed on the ground. Looking down the squirrel notices something. There is more food on the ground. It would be much easier to get. Squirrels appear to have little brains. They also perseverate. It continues to try the cage.

 

Part two was a lot harder. Write a half-page of narrative, up to 350 words, which is all one sentence.

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Steering the craft

Posted on April 11, 2011 at 10:51 am

I’m reading the book by Ursula K. LeGuin entitled Steering the Craft. It is a book about story writing. There are a number of exercises in it to try as you read the book. Here is the first exercise: Write a paragraph to a page that is meant to be read aloud.

 

My thoughts on deer:

Destructive deer are determined to drift onto my lawn and property. Seeking out fragrant flowers and shrubs that satisfy their never-ending appetite they enjoy frivolously feasting on our bounty busting branches that were beautifully set-up to enrich our landscape. They show no care for the work we have done to make our land pretty. Chomping on the tops of plants, leaving nothing but stems and roots. Leaving their droppings whilst pursuing their plunder, destroying all of the perennials and decorating our lean lawn with putrid poop to be stepped upon. Have they no care for our desires.

What can we do to stop them? Barriers and sprays don’t work. They shiver and shake when we’re around to see and fly at the least provocation. They patiently wait eyes and ears at the ready for any moment when we are not around or our backs are turned to again nibble and gnaw at our gardens. Then there are the ticklish tics that they bring and breed. Creeping, crawling little suckers of blood and bringers of disease that latch onto our clothes and skin as a reminder of the plunder of plenty that the deer have wrought to our humble hovel.

Some day, yes, some day we will prevail. But till then, we will continue to plant knowing that success is but a dream.

 

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Unfinished story

Posted on December 4, 2010 at 1:45 pm

You’ve heard of Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony”? Consider this my “Unfinished Story”. What I’ve written is exactly what was going around in my head one night. It was pleading with me to be written down. So I have done that. I’m welcome to any suggestions as to where I should take it from here.

Once there was a story. It was a simple story about a king and a queen. They were unable to have children and wanted an heir. As in most tales they made a deal to have a  a child. Of course the condition agreed upon required them to give up something valuable when the child reached a certain age. The condition didn’t concern the king or queen when the agreement was made, however when the child came of age they needed a way to break the agreement. The story unfolds and a quest is taken until finally all things work out in the end except for the proposer of the deal. As I said a simple story.

But now our story begins, because this story had nowhere to go. Yes, it was created. There was a wonderful beginning and a happy ending, but until it could be shared it had no life.

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A telling event

Posted on November 6, 2010 at 10:09 am

I just completed a Halloween storytelling gig. It was a marathon performance. Four – 45 minute shows in one day. Knowing that you are going to be telling for 3 hours you really need to prepare not only the material, but your voice.  Choice of stories and songs is always crucial to the preservation of your voice.  Not to mention lots of water and Fisherman’s Friend (a throat lozenge that contains menthol). It also helped to use a microphone during my performance, so I didn’t have to push my voice to be very loud. I did the first two performances with my wireless microphone clipped to my shirt. The last two I did with a standing microphone.  It had better quality, though didn’t allow me as much movement.

It is important to me to make sure that if I’m going to perform any stories that might scare anyone to give the audience a strategy to help prevent bad dreams and the like, especially if there are little children in the audience. I start every one of my Halloween type storytelling events by sharing a legend that I learned at the National Storytelling Festival from Kathryn Windham and Jackie Torrence.  When going to bed at night take your shoes off and put them on the floor at the base of your bed one shoe facing away from the bed, the other facing towards the bed. I’ve been doing this for the past 25+ years of storytelling. It works. You’d be amazed at how many people that have heard me tell over the years come back to me and thank me for helping them out.

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While you wait. . .Is this really necessary?

Posted on October 1, 2010 at 9:54 am

Why is it when we go into a waiting room, there always has to be a television blaring? It doesn’t matter whether it’s my car dealership, a doctor’s office, or even my tax accountant; you are always forced to listen and watch some television program. Why can’t they set up two rooms, one for those that need the distraction of TV and those that want a quiet place to read and contemplate life’s mysteries?

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Give credit

Posted on August 6, 2010 at 5:38 pm

I recently read an article in the New York Times about plagiarism and how students nowadays are becoming more and more clueless as to what constitutes infringement of other people’s intellectual property.  If it is posted on the Internet, it must be in public domain right? No.
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in the beginning…

Posted on July 14, 2010 at 11:52 am

I started teaching in 1973. For my birthday in 1974 a friend of mine gave me a guitar. I knew some basic chords that I had learned when I was a teenager and this new guitar inspired me to sing folksongs and incorporate them into my teaching. Granted the students (6th graders) that I was teaching were not going to be impressed with the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley”, but they did get into songs like “This Land is Your Land”, “The Titanic”, “Ballad of Jesse James”, and  “Battle of New Orleans”.  The summer of my third year of teaching a fellow teacher, Jerry Silverstein, took me to the Philadelphia Folk Festival for the first time, and I was introduced to a whole new set of tunes to use in class. Singing with kids became an important part of my teaching. I continued singing throughout my career.

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I’m sorry, what did you say?

Posted on July 9, 2010 at 2:22 pm

As I get older, it seems that my hearing has become more sensitive and less accurate at the same time. The same thing goes for my family. Obviously aging has something to do with this. Heredity plays a part also (my mother became hard of hearing when she was older). Part of my hearing sensitivity has to do with the environment I married into.

I married a woman from Iowa. She was very sensitive to things that were loud. She enjoyed quiet evenings in quiet places, which might have had some influence why she doesn’t like to go to movies. I grew up in New York right next to a subway train yard, loud radiators, in an apartment that had street sounds and light flashes all the time. My wife and I settled in a suburb in Long Island. The longer that we lived together the more used to quiet I became. Then we had my son. He grew up with a sensory integration issues. Too much stimulation, especially noise, made it difficult for him to do things. Hence there was even more quiet. The more used to quieter things I became, the more sensitive I was to louder sounds.

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